ernment the specious bubble should be exploded. That as an implication of sovereignty the United States may adopt colonialism and as a corollary maintain under the control of the president an army in distant islands or in any part of the world is one of the flimsiest political pretenses ever made. What is the meaning of the historic and settled principle that the federal constitution is a grant of power? Manifestly that a residue remains in the grantor and that the power not granted remains with the sovereignty which made the grant, namely, the states or the people through the states. Or what is meant by the correlative of this principle that the state constitutions are a limitation upon power? Manifestly that ultimate sovereignty or paramount and absolute power is with the people who are the source of all authority in this land. For power.here proceeds from the people up, and not as in monarchies from the sovereign down. Now suppose neither the states nor the people want a policy pursued; yet what can prevent it if the United States are the sovereign power, the repository of sovereign power, of paramount power, and their officials construe the sovereign power to the support of the unwelcome policy? Is it any answer to say that the people at the polls can reject or confirm the policy? No man who loves or understands constitutional government will say so. Nor can it be maintained for a moment that sovereignty is in the United States. Chief Justice Marshall in the great case of Gibbons v. Ogden said: "It has been said that they (the states under the Confederacy) were sovereign, were completely independent and were connected with each other only by a

league. This is true." Now when the constitution was framed they withdrew from the confederacy and formed "a more perfect union" under the constitution, as its preamble declares. But while they gave it into the hands of the general government to exercise great sovereign powers, they did not surrender their sovereignty, nor did the people back of the states surrender to any entity their paramount power. As laid down by Vattel nothing can be implied to increase the grant of power of the sovereign. The powers granted in the constitution to the United States are incidents of sovereignty, e. g., to declare war, coin money, lay taxes. But as the great constitutional lawyers of the past so often pointed out how absurd to specify and grant these incidents of sovereignty if sovereignty itself in its entirety was by the constitution transferred from the states and from the people, and at once by the ratification of the constitution vested in the general government with all the plenitude of its power. If the United States are sovereign, as the imperialists use the term, how is the constitution a grant of power; why were amendments to the constitution contemplated, and why should they be ratified by three-fourths of the several states? How can this monstrous sophistry of Hamilton, grown into imperialism itself, consist with the tenth amendment that "powers not delegated to the United States by the constitution nor prohibited by it (the constitution) to the states are reserved to the states respectively or to the people?" Powers of sovereignty the United States have had from the beginning, and should have had; but they never had sovereignty, because it was never granted to them,

and at the time of the adoption of the constitution it was in the states or the people of the states, as we may choose to view the question.

The doctrine of implied powers being sophistical in itself conducts to still more startling fallacies. For instance, it is an incident of sovereignty to make war, but by implication do the United States possess in connection with that incident of sovereignty the power of a sovereign nation to annex distant territory and overwhelm the order and the liberty of the states which granted the incident of sovereignty to make war? If so constitutions are superfluous, because language is not exact enough to express the limitations intended to be imposed. They can be avoided and evaded and the whole sovereignty drawn over to the medium of sovereignty by the deductions of metaphysics. How nearly shall be realized the prophesy of George Mason contained in the objections to the constitution which he submitted to the Virginia legislature? In explaining his refusal to sign the constitution he said: "The judiciary of the United States is so constructed and extended as to absorb and destroy the judiciary of the several states, thereby rendering laws as tedious, intricate and expensive and justice as unattainable by a great part of the community as in England; and enabling the rich to oppress and ruin the poor. * This government will commence in a moderate aristocracy; it is at present impossible to see whether it will in its operations produce a monarchy or a corrupt, offensive aristocracy. It will most probably vibrate some years between the two and then terminate in the one or the other."

An army fighting for liberty at home, and an army fighting against liberty abroad is the measure of constitutional progression which gives truth to these words. The cautious ninth and tenth amendments have turned out to be of no binding consequence? For, as seen, although the constitution is a grant of power; although enumeration of powers shall not be construed to deny or disparage those retained by the people; although powers not delegated are retained by the people-a system of legal sophistry, devised in large part by Hamilton and perfected by his followers, has sufficed to incorporate companies, confer special privileges and ingraft the very substance of monarchy upon the republic in the form of colonialism. What could the general government have done in addition if the people in the states had surrendered to it all power whatsoever? This denouement would be ridiculous if the ultimate scene already foreshadowed did not give promise of one of the most deplorable declines recorded in history.

This, then, is the foundation upon which rests the whole superstructure of that alleged sovereignty which never existed in the constitution. As it was cemented with a mixture of falsehood and fraud it is doomed to dissolve in the process of time which eats away all that is unreal; but when the foundation falls will not all that was good in our system perish with all of this created evil? What providence will reverse the universal rule?

ELECT THE FEDERAL JUDGES.

One of the great political parties has already taken a conventional stand in favor of electing senators by a direct vote of the people. This question when recently brought to an acute point of discussion was met by Senator Lodge of Massachusetts by an astonishing objection. It was that the election of senators by the people would destroy the constitutional theory of senators as representing states. The essence of his objection, if he were correctly reported, consisted in regarding the senators as "Ambassadors of the states," which their popular election would un-character. It cannot be perceived how the manner of their election by a state would make them less the representatives of the state as such. But this objection made by an exponent of the school which has taught that the constitution was the product of the people of America, and not the people of the states of America seems incongruous.

A reform of equal, if not indeed of deeper moment, is the election of the members of the Federal judiciary for terms of moderate length. The reasons which were urged in favor of a Federal judiciary appointed for life were long ago discovered to be pretentious and unsound. The Federal courts have for so long a time pursued a course of systematic usurpation that doubt can no longer be maintained against the accumulating